


With the Night

by terma_archivist



Category: The X-Files
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1998-01-07
Updated: 1998-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:22:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26535061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/terma_archivist/pseuds/terma_archivist
Summary: Part of a trifling series on a weirdly insistent theme.
Relationships: Alex Krycek/Walter Skinner
Collections: TER/MA





	With the Night

**Author's Note:**

> Note from alicettlg, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [TER/MA](https://fanlore.org/wiki/TER/MA) and was moved to the AO3 as part of the Open Doors project in 2019. I tried to reach out to all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are the creator and would like to claim this work, please contact me using the e-mail address on [the TER/MA collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/terma/profile).

**With the Night**

  
_And further still at an unearthly height,  
One luminary clock against the sky  
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.  
I have been one acquainted with the night._

Robert Frost 

Slumped into the crook of the couch and semi-absorbed in watching television, Alex still glanced up with the immediacy of old instinct when he heard footsteps near the apartment door. When the door began to open, his hand moved to the space between couch arm and cushion, where he had secreted a street-bought 9 mm, but then his dipped hand rose again—it was just Walter Skinner, carrying an overnight bag and a large briefcase. 

Alex's gaze latched to the luggage then lifted to consider the other man. "What's up?" he asked indifferently, turning back to the TV but remaining attuned to Skinner's movements. His peripheral vision tingled with hyperactive awareness.

"What's it look like," Skinner said, voice bland, as he hung his coat up. He made an absent grunting noise, perhaps of disgust, as he brushed snow off the coat and shook it off his bags. From the couch, Alex could not quite see Skinner run a hand over his uncovered head, but he could imagine that familiar action too easily. 

Alex would have preferred to ignore Skinner's rejoinder—the implications were obvious enough—but after a fidgeting minute of listening to Skinner enter the bedroom and then return to futz around the living area, he found it impossible to hold his tongue. "Looks like you're going to make a night of it," he said flatly, reaching for his beer, still not looking at the other man, who moved somewhere behind him, unseen but palpably present. 

"I'm having some rooms painted this weekend," Skinner said. 

Alex blinked thoughtfully at the television screen. "You desk jockeys—that cushy lifestyle really takes its toll on you, doesn't it. Can't even pick up a paint-roller... I'm surprised you're not worried about plants."

"That's why I'm doing it," Skinner said, and Alex heard the dry edge of satisfaction. The voice behind him continued speaking in a low register, almost to itself. "I've got the house monitored, and I've got someone lined up to do a sweep afterwards. Thought I'd give them the opportunity, see what comes of it. Find out how closely they're watching these days."

"Not a bad plan," Alex admitted, turning on the couch to rest his chin on the back and stare at Skinner. Mildly surprised at the other man's initiative, he dug his chinbone against the couch and considered him. He looked, as always, very much the ex-Marine, neat, trim, and exhibiting in the controlled trajectories of his movements a subdued, brooding vigor. A full charge of energy coiled in those abundant muscles; the advancing years hadn't advanced all that far. Tonight instead of his usual suit he was wearing a denim shirt and jeans, and looked too butch for words. 

Alex raised his hand to the couchback and rubbed his chin against it. He felt more expressionless than usual, as if gravity pulled more strongly at the muscles of his face, tugging its masked surface flat. He was already half hard; it bugged him. How dare his body betray anticipation, hunger, need—Alex was inclined to brutalize his rebellious flesh into submission, but hopping on the exercise bike seemed too blatant a provocation. Meanwhile, showing no sign he was aware of Alex's look, Skinner was opening his briefcase on the dinner table, setting up his laptop and stacking files. During his actions, his face, downturned in studious habit, reflected an absorption that suggested his thoughts were elsewhere, as if their arrival lagged behind his body, and yet it was a safe bet he was fully conscious of his solitary audience.

"I'm surprised you trust me not to pry," Alex said, staring at the array of business materials on the table. 

"When I'm done with this it all locks back up—and then I'm going to keep you busy." 

"Great," Alex said, but in contrast to his toneless voice his cock evidenced a more honest show of interest, stiffening a little further at the words. Luckily the couch hid this vital enthusiasm. Faintly disgusted with himself, Alex turned back to watching TV. He spent the next hour or so in a blank display of involvement with competitive gymnastics, his mind turning on a wheel which carried him through a continuous flow of restless thoughts: could he find someone to teach a one-armed, thirtysomething man how to backflip, should he get up and have another beer, what innovative demands would Skinner make on his body tonight, were there subliminal messages in that fast-food commercial, a backflip after all didn't involve arms, yes he definitely wanted another beer. 

Alex got up and went to the kitchen, grabbed a beer, then, after a moment's thought, another. He popped the caps on the lower edge of a cabinet, whose abraded wood already showed signs of regular service, then returned to the other room. He came up behind Skinner and let his hand slide down over the other man's shoulder, then made a small gesture of competency by rolling one gripped bottle to the forefront, in an offering. Alex's eyes flicked across the computer screen automatically while Skinner took the beer.

"It's nothing that would interest you."

"You're welcome," Alex said irritably.

"You're predictable." 

Indeed, Skinner sounded unbothered, unsurprised. Alex glared at the back of his head, tempted to stick out his tongue, but merely made a face instead, before taking a pull on his beer.

Skinner turned in his chair to stare up at Alex. His eyes performed a casual, habitual survey, as if he were assessing Alex's fashion choices or seeking evidence of a lapse in his exercise regimen—or perhaps just inspecting the well-marked districts of his territory. Alex was momentarily aware of the contrast between Skinner's expensive tidiness and his own more careless dress—recognized the difference and dismissed it. Irrelevant. He'd been wearing the same sweatpants and cut-off sweatjacket all day, even while working out. Clothes were a hassle these days. 

When Skinner stood, Alex had to forcibly command himself not to take a step back; his body twitched, live wire, then stilled. The forceful greeting of Skinner's mouth was not unexpected, but the force of his own body's response was. He wanted to chuck aside the beer, hated having one hand in such circumstances, wanted to feel something, anything, with what touch he had left. Skinner, unconstrained for his part, cupped Alex's ass with one hand, and his head with the other, fingers digging into his hair. Alex's face pulled into the resemblance of a snarl as he deepened the kiss despite himself. But they were both driven to this; their tongues skipped and jabbed like rapiers, sliding back and forth together, blades that mimicked intimacy as they dueled. Breath quickening, harshening, Alex accepted what would devour him, the strokes of fire spilling across the aching vaulted premises of his mouth, invasive and excruciating. 

He was harder than he'd realized; the pull of Skinner's body made him aware of himself, where his cock pressed rigidly into the other man taut belly. God, how long a week could be; the waiting that he refused to call by its name; the savagery of relief when it arrived. Mouth to mouth, he had to acknowledge that the connection was lifesaving, or near enough that it made no difference. 

"How much longer you gonna work?" he said after detaching his mouth to let his breath catch up. He could feel a broad hand still cupping and working his ass; his lust was humiliating and exhilarating. Feelings were not just mixed but melted together, inseparable in their cauldron.

"I'm done. Or I can be. But I want dinner."

"Ah, shit ," Alex said, grimacing. He met the other man's gaze, letting the look rise from beneath his lashes, tilting his head a little so that his rakishly unmannered hair caught at his eyes, knifing across their green smolder.

Skinner's hand rested proprietorially against the back of Alex's neck, and his thumb moved up under one ear, rubbing with a slow rhythm that suggested an unconscious sensual attention. His face showed no involvement, though; it might have been hacked from a slab of volcanic pumice, stiff and unsmooth though he worked to keep it smoothed flat of expression. "I was thinking that Chinese place."

"Mexican."

"Never again... pizza?" Skinner's voice was half-hearted.

"Thai."

"I knew you'd say that," Skinner said, eyes narrowing. "You've been through their menu twice over already. Aren't you sick of it yet?"

"Never. I could go for Greek, though."

"Mm. I don't suppose there's any reason we couldn't order both."

"Both what?"

"Greek. Chinese. Whatever."

Impatiently, Alex said, "Jesus. Chinese, then." 

Skinner frowned, said abruptly, "Have you always been so hung up on Thai food?"

"What—no, why—" But Alex was not slow on the uptake; and then, too, it was likely he had come to subliminally recognize that manner of frown, some peculiar tenor in the voice that indicated a particular train of thought. "You think they'd bother to canvass Thai restaurants all over the country, putting the word out to look for the nefarious one- armed man? Well, I guess it would be possible. But even I'm not that paranoid."

"Maybe you should be."

"Doesn't matter—it's a recent addiction." Alex smiled fractionally, almost unaware of his curving lips. Charm was bred in the bones, offhand, steeped in acid. "Worrying again, Walter? Seeing headlines? Bureau VIP and Toyboy Found Slain in Gay Love Nest—"

"When I'm slain I won't be around to worry about something like that."

Alex's eyelids lowered a notch. "Mm. Tough guy." He nudged his head in and carefully nipped at Skinner's lower lip, then opened him up with the wet point of his tongue. Down at hip-level, his cock throbbed in sympathetic greed. They kissed some more, lazily and then roughly, sparring and goading each other. Who would break first? Moving his hand, Alex brought the beer bottle down between their bodies and rubbed it against Skinner's crotch. Skinner deftly plucked away the bottle and put it on the table behind him. 

Hand free at last, Alex took advantage of its placement and began kneading the hard bulge in Skinner's jeans. Immediately, Skinner's mouth grew hotter, more strenuously demanding. The stretch of his body tightened further against Alex, straining muscles rolling like burls of magma under the surface. When had they started kissing like this? Alex couldn't put his finger on just when the shift from simple rutting to elaborate, unfettered pleasuring had taken place. There were times now when the ignition of lust was strong enough to send them tumbling to the ground, desperate, driven to grind their bodies together with an uncivilized lust that would not let them wait. Disturbing and unlikely, it knitted them more closely with the passing weeks, entangling them together with desire if nothing else—except that the more entwined their needs grew, the more difficult it was for them to pull apart afterwards and return to their separate cells of wary solitude. 

"I need to eat," Skinner muttered against Alex's mouth, but then his tongue carved back into the scrim, with plundering force.

"Eat me," Alex offered, after drawing back for his own breath, his voice no more than a thin exhalation.

"Not yet. God." Skinner made a face of bemusement and what looked like pain, then knifed the haze apart and scowled at Alex. "Keep doing that and I'll make you finish it."

"Make me," Alex said now, his eyes shooting diamond- sharp sparks. His voice husked the words out. "What else are you here for, anyway—right?"

Skinner's face adjusted itself slightly toward a cooler unreadability. "I guess that's right." He pulled Alex with him as he moved to the table, and when he sat back down in the chair, Alex submitted to the curved pressing weight of hand under which his neck burned, which drew him floorward to his knees. 

Already, his breath labored and his eyes drifted free of focus. His mouth felt wet with readiness for the particular lust evoked. And he could not decide if he wanted it merely as a kindling foreplay or for its own brute sake. Whatever, whatever, what did it matter. Kneeling, he rubbed his face against the arrowing rise of denim that was bracketed by Skinner's muscled thighs. The other man's hand busied itself unzipping what his jeans cruelly trapped, and in seconds the fly was open and the briefs shoved down, and then the length of him was free, pushing erect with almost pugnacious force, lifting with familiar tropism toward Alex's mouth. The waking monster was already deeply flushed, the swollen head pearled thickly with pre-ejaculate. 

Alex could have teased; sometimes did. But other times, as now, he could bear no prelude to plunging his mouth onto the other man's organ. Could not wait, could not. He shoved his open mouth forward and down, wrapping his hand around the base of the shaft. His head lowered and rose; with sure force he lifted up and worked on the head, sucking its upwelling juice and then letting the padded knob drag across the roof of his mouth toward the back of his throat. Above him, he heard Skinner draw in his breath—not once, but over and over again, a jagged crescendo of lust, pulling like a serrated blade from the throat. Strong hands held his head loosely in place, but never stayed still; carelessly, bluntly, but intimately they explored him, carding Alex's hair, cradling his jaw, rubbing across his ears. 

It was inevitable that the rhythm should escalate; within a few short minutes, Alex felt the other man's balls tighten and hug upward against the pulsing shaft; felt the throbbing prominence of vein stab more wildly beneath the skin. He did a few tricks with teeth and lips he knew would be welcome, then repeated them more gently. Now he was teasing, withdrawing his mouth and playing casually, eloquently with the brimming weight of flesh he held. 

He could not stand to ask outright what he wanted, so instead, when he could take it no more, he simply let go, abruptly cutting short the torment. He sat back, ass to heels, face upturned and waiting. 

Skinner breathed heavily through his nostrils, lips pressed shut. His cock jutted from his jeans, slick, dark, and rudely hard. "You want it now?" he asked, voice abraded into a shadowed half-tone of itself.

"Yeah." Alex licked his lips thoughtlessly and then made a sound like an embryonic laugh that refused full birth. "You taste like soap, Walter. You shower just for me?"

Skinner blinked, not quite pulled from his haze, despite the hooked barb of Alex's voice. "I had to wash the office off," he said.

Alex felt a pleasant flush spill through his body, blood stirred to life by the dark currents within Skinner's voice. Crazy to think they were alike in anything, and yet at times— at times the resonance told itself this clearly, in the drop of one small phrase, and often they both recognized the moments. They shared the bitterness of having bitten too deeply into the offered apple. There was that, at least. 

Rising, Alex gave Skinner a brief look that conveyed invitation. He stretched his arm behind his head and pulled off his top rather than unzipping it, then entered the bedroom without looking back. The bedroom was clean and showed only sparse signs of habitation—a few books, and the flung clothes of a single man with the luxury of simplicity and no one to chide him for his minor messes. The room faced west and was filled with light. Outside the window the winter sky was lit with strands of fire that should have melted the snow which lined ledges and rooftops and blew erratically off in the wind. But the blazing strata, like an illuminated fire opal, might have been as cold. In a tree across the street the light tangled in the branches and was immeasurably painted on the sky behind. 

Alex moved to a window and stared out; he'd known Skinner was early this evening, but his mental clock had failed him—it could be, now, no more than half past five. He shifted when Skinner appeared next to him. Remaining to one side, out of line of sight from the street, Skinner turned the stick on the blinds, angling their slats to obscure the view. 

"You came earlier than I thought."

Skinner made a slight, almost facetious face, but never susceptible to easy puns he merely said, "I left early. Or on time, depending on who's judging the measure of my work day." 

"Who does?"

With a dry twitch of lips, Skinner squinted abstractedly through the blinds into the piercing sun, and said, "No one, actually. But if I don't do the time, the shit gets hip-deep fast. Anything less than seventy hours and I might as well be a slacker." He paused as if contemplating the wisdom of voicing such remarks, then added after a moment, "Probably wouldn't last six months before they'd ease me out, or I'd walk in one day and find a cushion on my chair."

Alex spoke while pushing out of his sweats. "Cushion? What's that, executive equivalent of finding a pencil taped to your locker?"

"I expect so... pencils? That's no bureau tradition." Skinner unbuttoned his shirt. Still heavily erect he looked indecent to Alex's appreciative eyes.

"NYPD," he said absently, speaking with automatic finesse the lines of a scripted self whose lies and truth folded into one another. "When you're no good on the street anymore they let you know. Time to ride a desk, push the pencils. Vroom, vroom." Alex, naked now, touched Skinner's collarbone and the flesh below, tracing small scars that threaded whitely across the surface. It was like touching polished wood, marked by use. "I don't think you're ready for pasture yet, even if you do drive a desk, Walt." His voice, though low and lightly mocking, paid a certain degree of respect; yet it was best his regard should always remain less than earnest. In more brooding moments, Alex was apt to regret warm words as forfeited advantages. Any point yielded might tote up to his later downfall. 

"Mm." Skinner nudged off his jeans, kicked them away. "Desktops make for some of the ugliest battlefields I've seen."

"That's saying a lot, I bet." Alex ran his hand down the other man's chest, scratching lines not unlike the residual scars, fresh red to their white. Nipples hardened and he traced a circle around one, watching it tighten, not missing the action below, where Skinner's resurging arousal made a similar, more potent display of the body's ability to erect its tissues. 

After another moment, they both moved simultaneously, stepping as if into one another, their chests and hips pressing close, angles of their bodies bumping here and there, mouths locking even as their hips rubbed together, lance to lance in a familiar battle. This simulation of intimacy lasted not long before Skinner twisted Alex around and gave him a rough shove onto the bed. The roughness was what Alex had been waiting for, that sudden breath-stealing loss of balance as the storm picked him up and tossed him. In seconds, they were wrapped together on the bed, a braid of flesh whose elements were difficult to distinguish, equally convolute and lost. Now a knot of limbs, now a snarl. They hurt each other, biting without restraint, peppering each other's skin with bruises. Skinner had the advantage, however, and eventually used it, flipping Alex face down in the disarray of sheets and pinning him there while readying himself. When he was sheathed, lubed, he pulled Alex up and let him feel the edge of that blunt force he would be taking in. 

Alex, balanced precariously, shuddered his need; the tightly pocketed entrance to his body blazed with the raw, nerved prescience of a recognized sensation, while in the depths of himself he felt only the dull lack of fulfillment. Just the weight of Skinner's cock resting along his ass made him seethe and twist; getting that much meat inside would split him apart, gut him like a fish sliding to halved pieces on the length of a bowie knife. 

Not getting it would drive him mad. 

He pushed his ass back, and in doing so thought, helpless to the thrall of memory, of Mulder. It sent a savage furl of irony and amusement through his wired being to picture a greedy Fox caught and impaled on the same spear of flesh that was pushing its way into Alex now. Would he throw back his head, would his eyes glaze as he surrendered, would he gasp, fight, howl his gratitude, pass out? 

And then Alex could only think of himself. It was nearly too much, always precisely a hair short of too much; he had never given himself up for fisting, but imagined it would compare poorly to this. He spent his breath in short, helpless gasps, refusing to sing his approval, and then with one final jab the invader was fully embedded, the pressure of balls signalling it could go no further. Skinner's cock. Sometimes, alone, loosely thralled in fantasy, Alex tried to puncture his own swelling lust by thinking of it in derisive terms: Walter Skinner's Mighty Dick. But ridicule could not break the addiction, and size alone was not the full measure of Alex's fascination. 

Groaning, Alex felt himself pulled upright. "Ah—God—yes, you fucker—bastard—oh sweet fucking Jesus *yes*—" Driven out of himself, past articulation, Alex might have been sixteen again, rendered tongue-tied and stupid by the novelty of rut. 

"You like that—"

"Yes—harder—yes—"

"Harder—you like this—" Hands pulled Alex back into a fitted arch, touched him everywhere, casually and familiarly, grabbing a slippery palmful of his hair and yanking his head back, stroking up and down his abs, sliding behind to grip his ass, to open him up further. He sobbed as rude fingers chafed his nipples, as they pinched and fondled him and rose to his throat to collar him briefly but emphatically. 

"Ah, god—don't—don't stop that—" Alex rotated his ass with a deft screwing maneuver that brought from Skinner a quiet yell—a vocalizing trick that Alex never in his life had heard from anyone else. The piercing bulk inside him pumped harder, pulling Alex back with dragging motions that made him feel insubstantial, as if his ass—his entire body—were a plug of cork stabbed and riding on a fish-hook; all the power and volition of their act was behind him, in the other man's hard curve of cock. 

He was a man without a name, without history, past or future, given over to this—just a fuck, but essential, necessary as food to him. What did words matter, banter and skirmish, if this clash of flesh was possible. It honed something in the soul, kept life lit. To shove back against another man and feel each bone in the body matched, nearly, angle to angle, strike to strike like wielded staffs, to feel a man's cock staking its claim, confirmed one's most basic existence. Alex was *there*. Staked to the dirty ground of the earth, twisting on what tethered him, breathing as keen as fire. And the keening was in his throat as well, rising, primal, desperate; his head shook itself wildly on Skinner's shoulder, he thought of Mulder, his lust stabbed higher and higher, but it was Skinner who was there with him, big and solid as a wall behind him, impossible to push down, safe as houses, dangerous as a grizzly, a near stranger in all things but this, and so not a stranger at all. 

Roughness of their cheeks scratching, a fine, aching hurt, abetted with other sensations toward a killing intensity—a bladed fire that pushed through his ass and carved Alex senseless, carved him relentlessly onto a single point that he could feel high inside him like a knob of diamond—this, and the building strain of countless muscles, a tremelo stress in his architecture, a wild chafe of back to chest, ass to hips, the trembling widespread sprawl of his thighs against a buffer of heavier muscle. He rode and was ridden. It was a simple repetition of tiny, subtle actions, small twists, little grinds of ecstasy—hips, ass, shoulderblades—and then deeper, harder movements, the exquisitely forced, almost painful effort toward a shared achievement, sustained and stretched to that nearly unbearable tension that seeks to break itself.

Alex's head ground itself round and around on Skinner's shoulder, lifted and dropped itself. He parted his lips and breathed a moan of assent when blunt fingers stroked his sensitized nipples, when broad hands flowed down his body like waves of lava toward his pelvis to weld there, to hold him, and then he choked off a half-formed curse, or a yes that could not be spoken, as one hand moved further, to grip his swollen, blazing cock the way a man might grip a fire-heated knife. No fancy favors, the hand just took him and squeezed, but did so over and over, not leaving him, moving faster and gripping harder as it proved it knew exactly what he needed, unyielding even when Alex's own hand closed over its clasp and meshed their fingers together—the feeling was impossible, shaming, too much to bear. It felt like his father's hand, not the twist of incest but the simple interlocked catch of key to lock, breath-taking, beautiful, and completely unacceptable. Alex came with poorly stifled screams that he would have hated if he were able—high-pitched sounds that stripped his throat raw and revealed a pleasure that branded him, that even as his half-closed eyes rolled like wet pearls back in his head, in the ripped timeless ecstasy of climax, defined and betrayed him as... .

But no part of his pleasure-stormed mind finished the thought, never did. 

Skinner's own sounds of pleasure broke low and near in Alex's ears, grunts and groans of a man whose inhibitions are momentarily loosened, who perhaps is not aware of how deeply his throat offers up his ecstasy. He cried out "Oh god, oh Christ!" in a hoarsened voice that made Alex's skin sweep with a rippling sheer of brazen fire and sent a final spasm of iced jism through his blurting cock. He beat his skull one last time on the bouldering pillow of muscle behind him and then fell back into his body, gasping for breath, brought to a sudden sharp awareness of his aching, thorn-sharp nipples, his depleted cock, and a body blissed on the perfection of being fucked to pieces by a man who knew how to fuck a man.

Alex slumped forward, melting onto the bed. His ass felt like a swollen bowl of seed, spilling itself—this even though skinner had used a condom. He liked the aftermath, the sense of mess that was its own kind of bliss, a wallowing in base essences. But it wasn't to be lingered over. After this nod to animalism, Alex usually felt compelled to rinse clean—shower or shit, whatever would break the spell of that brief, post- coital contentment. The physical mistake of happiness was not to be treasured; it was weakness, a window of vulnerability. This was as true now as any time, and so when Skinner rolled away and stretched out on the bed, Alex's first thought was to seek the solitude of the bath. 

But as he moved, Skinner snagged his arm and held him, and then wordlessly drew him back. Alex, grudging, dark eyes cooling back to steel, said nothing either for a minute, then grew restless. 

"Don't get warm and cuddly on me, Walter," he said with irritable venom. 

"I don't like it when you race from the bed to wash me off," Skinner said, voice sliding toward a menace Alex hadn't expected. Perhaps thinking of his own earlier remark about washing off the office, Skinner added, "If this is just a job to you, you can resign. I'm not payrolling your services."

Alex's eyes narrowed speculatively. "So what do you care if I want to shower?" he said, turning the question into a hard challenge. Implications and unspoken terms lay between them like spilled petals on the sheets, their scent distracting, thin and bruised. 

Skinner's jaw tensed; the bafflement of their uneasy arrangement written into his face. "Do as you like," he said. His detachment was abrupt, seemingly absolute. He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, but seemed less hurt than piqued. Walter Skinner was inviolable, of course. No one could chisel down to a heart through such a thickness of stone as he fronted. 

Alex stared at the other man in the semi-darkness that had come into the room while they fucked. "What exactly am I doing here ?" 

Skinner reached and turned on the light, then looked over at Alex as if he had needed to see something clearly before answering. " You're doing wonders for my peace of mind ."

"Yeah? How's that? " Alex husked dryly, stretching in the covers alongside Skinner, deferring his intent to leave . The rumpled bed draped blue folds of coverlet around their legs like irregular ocean fringes. 

"You know well enough. I don't want you loose."

Alex snorted; a mere crumb of a laugh. His eyes glinted darkly, more truly amused. "Hey, Walt: I *am* loose. If I want to go, I'm going. I don't need the Skinner pension plan."

"When did your options start arriving?"

Mouth twisting briefly, Alex said, "If nothing else, I've got my gun hand."

Skinner's eyes darkened without a blink; even the spilling lamplight could not penetrate their pooled depths. "You want to reconsider that line of work, son. It's not... healthy." Something in his voice made clear that ill health, whatever form it might take, was not a distant or abstract possibility but a presence in the very room, near as the dark cat-curl of the silent telephone, sitting less than eighteen inches from Skinner's pillow-rested head.

Alex loathed feeling the collar tighten, the leash pull. It made him surly, but he hid the full extent of his distaste. "You're so sexy when you're ethical," he jibed nastily. "It's such an exotic look for you." 

In the jeer was strange truth; it turned Alex on to see Skinner in full executive regalia, in his sedate Brooks Brothers suit, solid tie and tiebar, polished and unobtrusive leather shoes. Gun on hip, badge over heart: these were the icons of a desire whose purity could not be tarnished or tainted by anything Alex might do. The clean white shirts of justice and government had always held an ineluctable appeal for him, and now recalled him also to better times, when the future seemed to beckon on high, promising rewards for his right actions. He had once believed that to earn the approval of those in power would bring that power within his own grasp, at which time he would be... inviolable. As Skinner was, damn him. Unfair—it was so utterly, bitterly unfair. Had he been less unwitting, less easily led—if only he had kept his head, he could have kept his place. 

If a thousand impossible things.

"If ethical purity turns you on," Skinner said uncannily, "you must have ridden from cold shower to shower working with Mulder." 

Alex's breath caught. It was a blade slipped between the ribs, unerringly striking him where he ached the most. In his soul he flinched and bled; his face showed hard indifference. He knew—had known for some time, intuitively—that it would never do to tell Skinner what he and Mulder had once had. That they had slept together, that he had fucked that sweet, pure ass and made Mulder scream with joy and worked his hands around that impure throat until his bright, twisted fox, the Fox of unbearable dark need and fire, was undone to a different, less comfortable pleasure. To tell Skinner that would be to hand the man a weapon he could not help but fire. At himself, at Alex—maybe, worst of all, at Mulder.

Out loud, he said only, "Mulder's a saint." Then, with a fine dry nuance of sneer, "An absolute *angel*, Walter. You should try it on with that foxy ass sometime—I bet he'd go for it. I bet he'd go for a new daddy." It was too much. Alex had gone over the invisible line they kept taut between them, and knew it as soon as he spoke. He did not aggravate the matter by displaying regret.

Skinner stared at Krycek from an angle and proximity that made him feel he had suddenly awakened to look up into the face of an intimate demon. The man who lay propped next to him seemed suddenly more than merely human, more significant. Dark currents, darker waters farther out. Beyond the cruelly bladed words, behind the carved stone face and impenetrable targets of his eyes was an unreachable fathom of otherness, the throne room of a lost soul. 

And—beyond belief—it called to something in him. Skinner hated the attraction, tried with every particle of himself to link evil with evil, to tell himself Krycek was simply enseamed in the pure black fabric of horror, threaded fast with the monstrosities of bloody battlefields, with the dripping entrails left by serial killers, with the venal snakes of corruption—men like the unnameable Morley and others Skinner had known. That was what he wished to believe, that there was a veil of darkness unalleviated by light and that it hung apart from all good things, and that on its perimeter was a grey front of ill weather into which a man could drift—but that if lucky could escape again. This was his imagining, the perception he used to maneuver his own self: he would steer his boat from the storm. He would reach safe harbor, and the skies would be clear. 

But it was not like that; not here and now. The dark spell of weather was in himself, and it was not all dark, but was instead blazed with lightning. In places, luminous. 

Just fucking, just an arrangement, he told himself; with a man who, if justice were served, would be locked away to serve hard time. 

And coming in his body was like coming alive. Locking with him, body to body, was like feeling an opposing equal, a sparring partner, struggle not to master him but to reach him, to grapple his flesh purposefully toward some vaguely sensed understanding. Would it be like this with anyone else (with Mulder)? He couldn't imagine, couldn't compare. He had only this to go on; with no one else had sex and power been so fraught with cryptic meaning—so difficult to slough off once the grappling had ended.

These feelings, like an epiphany, arrived in him in the space of an instant, and slid like a dark spoon of medicine through him. He blinked, studied Krycek, tried to fathom the knotted problem. At the heart of a knot was an emptiness. 

"I've never asked if you killed him," he said, surprised to hear his own words. Krycek's face looked anticipatory, watchful. "Mulder thinks you did."

"I know," Krycek said. He said no more.

Skinner looked away, eyed the bedside clock, then rubbed a hand across his scalp, which tingled with settling fervor. His body was descending—still, now—from the height of pleasure, coming down slowly from the scaled peak. There were things he should not attempt to know, dark spots of shadow not to be poked lest they turn into tigers and bite. 

"I'm hungry... hungrier," he said. Krycek, moving a little, gave a tiny sound that suggested agreement.

"Thai," Krycek said then, grinning as suddenly and widely as a jack-knife springs open. "Wasn't that what we decided on?"

Another abrupt End. 

* * *

07 Jan 1998  
Skinner/Krycek slash. NC-17. Part of a trifling series on a weirdly insistent theme. My playthings are borrowed. Archive as you like it.   
Feedback welcome [email removed]   
---


End file.
